Where are all the weapons of mass destruction?

That's the question that Democrats keep asking over and over.

And it's a darn good question.

(First of all, I must tell you I can't use the phrase "weapons of mass destruction" ever again. I am so tired of it, I can't bear to type it anymore. It sounds so dramatic. It sounds so Vaudevillian. It sounds so, well, stupid. So from now on, in my little corner of the world of journalism, these things will be known simply as "big bombs.")

Truly, during the run up to the Iraq war, we were told over and over that Saddam Hussein had a whole pile of big bombs.

It was one of the most pressing reasons used to justify going in and taking Saddam out of power.

We had to get him out of there before he gave a terrorist a big bomb.

We had to get him out of there before he used big bombs on his own people or his neighbors.

And we had to get him out of there before he developed even bigger bombs than the big bombs he already had.

He might even be trying to make a nuclear big bomb, we were told.

So intuitively and logically it only follows now that we are in control of Iraq, we should be able to find at least a few of those big bombs.

And since we haven't, this gives the W detractors lots of ammunition.

They claim we were misled. They claim W and his administration lied to us.

They claim it was all just a big ploy, a giant hoax perpetrated on the entire world in order to rationalize an otherwise unjustifiable war against Iraq.

Well, I think that's bogus.

Now, I do fully agree that the question, "Where are the big bombs?" needs to be answered. I think if we have looked under all the rocks in Iraq and there still are no big bombs lurking there, there should be an investigation.

But I don't think we should be investigating whether W, and Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condi Rice and Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld lied to us.

I don't think they did.

I say that with a high degree of certainty. I truly believe they believed what they were telling us.

If we're going to investigate anybody, it should be the people who were feeding W and his people the information they shared with us.

We all know Saddam had big bombs when he killed hundreds of thousands of Kurds with poison gas. That's documented.

And I watched CNN the day Powell laid out the case against Saddam. The evidence of Saddam's big bomb programs was pretty compelling.

Powell had lots of sources and lots of satellite pictures and frankly, I was fully convinced.

As were most Americans.

Do you really think that all the evidence was cooked up by the U.S. government?

And further, do you believe W, Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld, et. al., knew it was cooked up and went along with it just because they wanted so badly to go to war?

Do you believe not one of them had the best interest of the nation in mind?

Maybe I'm naive, but I really think they were doing what they thought was right for the country, based on the information supplied to them.

And if it turns out there were no big bombs, I don't think it was because of some vast conspiracy.

I thing it was because of bad intelligence.

It's like that computer term, GIGO. Garbage in, garbage out.

If you input bad data the only thing you can generate is bad data.

If that's the case, we have a colossal failure in our intelligence community.

And we need to figure out why and get it fixed.

If there was a failure in the intelligence world, I have an idea why.

During the previous couple administrations, the budget for that type of thing was cut.

The CIA and the FBI were downsized.

Federal budget priorities changed. People who urged increased funding for the CIA and FBI were labeled as alarmist, isolationists, zenophobes or just plain goofballs.

Remember the "The Cold War is over" crowd during the Clinton administration?

Now, the same liberal politicians and pundits who deplored the use of tax dollars to fund intelligence gathering and covert operations by the CIA are wondering why we had poor intelligence on Iraq.

If there are no big bombs in Iraq, we need to investigate. But we don't need to investigate a government conspiracy.

We need to investigate ways to improve our intelligence gathering capabilities. [[In-content Ad]]